Women imams of China

Women imams of China

Henan is China's poorest and most populous province. It has 100 million inhabitants, mostly farmers, many of whom have failed to benefit from the economic boom on the Pacific coast. But Zhengzhou, the capital of this central province, offers the visitor all the external signs of an often artificial modernity: its suburbs bristle with tower blocks, most of them empty or still being built. There seems to be no end in sight to the property bubble that has been enriching developers and party cadres.

The rest of the city is unremarkable. Like most of 21st-century China, it consists of an accumulation of ugly buildings repeated ad infinitum. However, the purpose of my visit is not to pass aesthetic judgments on China's city planners but to meet the Muslims who make up a considerable proportion of Zhengzhou's inhabitants.

The city's two largest mosques are located in a quiet street some way from the city centre. They represent a world completely apart, that of the Hui, one of the main Islamic communities in China. With their upturned pagoda-like eaves, the mosques show local architectural influences. Were it not for the verses from the Qur'an displayed in the entrance, one might be entering a far eastern Asian temple. In the streets outside, women wear traditional hijabs and men skullcaps.

The Hui form a community of about 10 million people spread over several provinces. Although mostly found in Henan (900,000) and in the northwestern province of Gansu, 1.5 million of them live in the province that the Chinese government created specially for them: the "Hui autonomous region" of Ningxia, north of Zhengzhou.

The history of Islam's spread into China is not well known. In the seventh century, after the caliph Otman set up his first embassy there, Arab and Persian traders, scholars and diplomats entered China as far as Canton via the Silk Road and by sea. They eventually formed their own class of high-ranking civil servants, especially under the Yuan Mongol dynasty. Later, erudite scholars well-versed in Chinese, Arabic and Persian (the language in which learning was passed on) confirmed the emergence of a Chinese Islam as a cultural and religious force.

From the 10th century on, these Muslims married Chinese women and founded families. Their descendants today are the Hui, Muslims who speak Mandarin and cannot be distinguished physically from the rest of the population. The Hui have melted into the ethnic landscape, unlike some other Chinese Muslims such as the Uighur, from Xinjiang region, who are descended from Central Asian tribes and speak a Turkic language.

The Hui would be just another Sunni community, albeit somewhat exotic compared with those in the Middle Eastern Islamic world, were it not for the fact that they have instituted a tradition that is almost unknown among Muslims: the setting up women's mosques, or nüsi, and the creation of female imams.

It is a fairly recent tradition: the first nüsi would seem to go back only to the 19th century and the reign of the Qing dynasty. Until the communist revolution in 1949 there were 32 nüsi throughout China. According to 1997 statistics, after being reinstated in the wake of the dark years of the Cultural Revolution and the de-Maoisation process that allowed the return of religious practices, they now number 29.

The women's mosque in Zhengzhou, which was built in 1912, is more than a holy place; it is a living space where dozens of women, most of them elderly, meet in a convivial atmosphere. They do not practise any form of ostracism against men, who have their own mosque next door but are not forbidden from entering the women's building except during the five daily prayer sessions.

I was introduced to two leaders of the community. One of them, 80-year-old Miss Du, occupies the post of ahrom (imam). The other, Miss Dan, is in charge of administration. They occupy a large room cluttered with old furniture that gives on to an inner courtyard full of potted plants leading to the prayer area.

Du, who wears a black headscarf spread over her shoulders, is bent with age but remains spry and talkative. "From my childhood on, I have devoted myself to the study of the Qur'an. At the age of nine I already studied in a madrasa [Qur'anic school] and my parents never opposed the idea of my becoming an ahrom."

Du remembers the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution of the 60s, when the Red Guards burned books - "though some of them", she admits, "did protect the mosques".

She is accompanied by a social sciences researcher, Shui Jingjun, who explains why in her view private areas were created for women: "It is rather embarrassing for men to teach the Qur'an to women, so it became necessary to set up special schools for women. There is no great religious fervour here in the central plains, and the idea was to encourage it by getting young women interested in religion.

"One has to remember that we Muslim Chinese form but a drop in the ocean of the Han [China's main ethnic group]. The emergence of mosques for women should be seen as yet another survival factor, a natural reaction on the part of a minority." Dan and Du smile mischievously: "Remember that women are better organised than men, and that's also true as far as mosques are concerned."

My next port of call is Sanpo, a village two hours' drive from Zhengzhou where the Hui are no longer a "drop in the ocean of the Han", but form the majority. Four thousand people, all of them Muslim, live in Sanpo, which lies in the middle of a huge plain watered by the Yellow River and smells strongly of sheep tanning, the area's main industrial activity.

Relations between the Hui and the Han have not always been easy. Although Muslims have enjoyed the status of a minority since 1953 (there are 56 such minorities in China) they are sometimes the target of mockery and contempt. Last autumn a road accident not far from Sanpo got out of hand and several thousand farmers from the two communities fought a pitched battle in the middle of the countryside that left seven dead and 42 injured.

Maryam Donping, 38, is a beautiful ahrom who dresses in a green woollen jacket and matching trousers. The only sign of strictness in her apparel is the hijab that frames her face. She graduated from a Qur'anic school in 1990 and arrived in Sanpo eight years ago with her husband, who is also an imam. She also teaches the Qur'an in Arabic and Persian at a school next door to the mosque. Maryam feels that in China "equality between men and women is encouraged; that is why Muslim women are not discriminated against here as they sometimes are elsewhere. As a woman, I feel equal to men."

When asked if that is not one of the consequences of communism, which in theory advocates equality between the sexes, she replies: "Yes, here in China we practise an Islam that has Chinese characteristics" - a politically correct way of defining the concept. "The national ideology takes precedence over the doctrine of Islam. We live in a communist country, but we're free to practise our religion. No one is any longer forced to give up his or her beliefs. In our view it's important to live in peace with the system. The People's Republic of China doesn't force us to be communists and leaves us free to believe in God. Nor does Chinese communism force us to become the slaves of atheism."

Maryam then launches into another argument which is more in tune with the return to tradition that exercises the minds of modern Muslims. "It's true that in China young people attend the mosque less and less. The most fervent believers are those over 40. But the youngsters who go to the mosque understand Islam better. In the old days we were Hui because our parents were Hui. Nowadays people understand better what that means from a religious standpoint."

She sees as proof of that the increasing number of students who go abroad to Islamic countries to study the holy scriptures. "Nowadays there are more and more young Chinese Muslims, both male and female, who complete their education in Saudi Arabia, Iran or Malaysia. They come back with a better understanding of the texts. I teach in a Qur'anic school and I realise the extent to which women, particularly those returning from abroad, are shocked by western behaviour."

Maryam, who believes in the equality of the sexes, regards the West that she has not visited as a world of decadence and debauchery. "Look at the way women walk around in miniskirts, flaunting their naked bodies in the streets of your countries. Here Muslim women realise that the idea of unbridled sex is contrary to the rules of Islam. On the other hand, women should be free to marry who they want. That's got nothing to do with free sex. I believe that the equilibrium of society depends on women dressing discreetly."

Is Maryam in favour of imposing sharia law? She hesitates for a moment under the watchful eye of the local head of religious affairs: "We encourage people to organise their lives in accordance with Islamic laws. But here in China we also have to abide by the laws of the party."

The head of a women's mosque in Zhengzhou calmly told me the previous day that Osama bin Laden was "a hero of Islam". She said she had been "relieved" on learning that "the New York towers had fallen". Maryam does not go as far as that: there is no element of Salafism in her arguments, even though that ultra-fundamentalist branch of Islam carries some weight in Henan. Yet she does feel that "the terrorists were the product of American imperialism. It was the Americans who forced people to take up arms. After all, the Chinese were also seen as 'terrorists' during the war against the Japanese."

That is one way of reconciling the irreconcilable - official ideology with a return to the purity of the Qur'an's origins.